Quote:
Originally Posted by jackie nguyen
sorry for triple post, too late to edit
found something interesting.
All children are atheists -- they have no idea of God.
-- Baron d'Holbach, defending the "weak" definition for the word atheist, in Good Sense (1772), quoted from George H Smith, "Defining Atheism," in Atheism, Ayn Rand, and other Heresies
what a cool belief system they dont even know about.
Not having any idea of God and rejecting an idea of God after knowing about it are two very different things. It's strange that such simple understanding is so easily clouted.
Let's put the nails in this coffin. Atheism is a body of thought, a way of a thinking, a doctrine. The doctrine categorically rejects the supernatural, whether it's the monotheistic God of the bible and the God of other monotheistic religions or the polytheistic gods of Hinduism and ancient religions like the Greek gods. Every thing, event, phenomenon - every aspect of our realm - must have a formal, empirical and rational, logically and mathematically understandable basis, and anything as of yet unexplained must also fall into these systems of understanding. Then and only then will it come into acceptance i.e., there can be no other way, as understood by its stringent requirement of evidence. These points are part of the (unwritten) doctrine. Do not confuse this with knowledge in general. In science, for example, explaining why is explaining how. The answer to every why is just a deeper look into the how. In religion, there typically isn't a how, since the answer is almost exclusively supernatural, but a why. (As as an aside, I'll take a jab at theoretical physicists and say that their field is perhaps the only one where mathematics and science meets faith. The idea of math-based faith seems rather crazy, I know, but it is what it is.)
These things make it a "belief system", not a religion. Religions contain within them beliefs systems, but they are not of themselves belief systems. I think this where is the friction often occurs. Atheists hear theists and other believers say that "Atheism is a belief system" and it's almost as if they instinctively hear "Atheism is a religion." This kind of cognitive registration is probably just one result of the Atheistic indoctrination process, but I could be mistaken on that. Any form of organized Atheism can be classified as a religion. You may notice that this can't possibly happen because the objective and purpose of Atheism is the disbelief of all religions. This is chaos; religion by design is ordered, so you can never have Atheism as a religion.